Paging Mr. Tweet
Mr. Tweet is a new web service that examines your Twitter followers and recommends:
- Which of your followers should you be following in return?
- What people out there should you be following that might not be?
Unlike that crazy Twitterscore thing a few weeks ago, you don’t have to give your login information to Mr. Tweet. All you have to do is follow @mrtweet. That’s it. In just a few minutes later, Mr. Tweet DM’s you a web report. It’s pretty slick. Here’s a screen shot. Click on it for a larger version.
You’ll see under each photo, it says “already following.” I’ve followed the guidance of Mr. Tweet and followed the people it thought were influential and I should follow them.
Pretty interesting, and no personal information given up. You should give it a try.
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YouTube Goes Widescreen and HD(?)
If you’ve been on YouTube the last day or so, you may have noticed that the player box has been extended and most of the videos on the site now have black bars on either side, much like an HD tv set when it shows 4:3 programming. Here’s a screen shot:
So why would YouTube do this when the vast majority of user’s videos aren’t in that dimension?
Easy.
HD, baby.
Check out this video in amazing 720p high def on YouTube.
To see if a video is in YouTube in widescreen/HD, add this to the end of the URL string:
&fmt=22
Here’s the other very interesting thing. You can embed these widescreen HD videos as well, with a simple hack of the embedding code. Here’s the code:
<object width="480" height="397"><param name="movie" value="(VIDEO EMBED URL)&ap=%2526fmt%3D22"></param><param name="wmode" value="window"></param><embed src="(VIDEO EMBED URL)&ap=%2526fmt%3D22" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="window" width="480" height="397"></embed></object>
Thanks to Webmonkey for the code. This is very interesting. I’m getting stuttering HD playback here - how is the playback for you?
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Handbrake Now Takes Formats That Aren’t DVD
For the last few years, I was using VisualHub as my video transcoder of choice. It was great - it took anything you threw at it and could export in a myriad of formats - FLV, MP4, WMV, iPod friendly version, and so on.
Sadly, the developer of VisualHub recently quit and won’t be updating the software any more*. That’s bad news for us web people who relied on it to do quite a bit of video work for us.
HandBrake, on the other hand, has been another program that’s been in my toolbox for awhile as well. It’s a cross-platform app that will rip DVDs. We use it for legitimate reasons - we often get DVD’s from offices and groups on campus and need to quickly and easily rip those DVDs for use on the web or in other video projects. HandBrake does that job very, very well. It’s got many settings for output but it only output in MP4 and a few other formats. This was usually fine for the work I’m doing.
Yesterday, HandBrake released version 0.9.3 of its software. It now will accept pretty much any media file you throw at it and transcode that to MP4. Unlike VH, it won’t give you outputs to formats like Flash video, but that’s what encoding.com is for I guess.
While it’s cool the HandBrake team updated to allow this new functionality, it seems they took out code that to me seems was the whole point of the app - DVD decoding. Well, not the decoding, but specifically the DVD decryption. If you use VLC, you should still have access to the libraries needed to decode the DVD stream.
* - It looks like there’s an open-source push to create a new version of the VisualHub software. More here.
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